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It has been quite awhile since I have watched Serial Experiments: Lain. Although the show came out in 1998 (I Think) I did not watch it until probably the mid 2010's. I am always looking for shows and music from the 80's and 90's the time I grew up, that I have not seen before that are relevant and contemporary pieces to that time and place. I am big into Cyberpunk and Industrial genre's especially since it has allot of dark themes that we are in the process of dealing with in these times.
I think Lain is a really good show! Without getting into too many of the themes here (perhaps I can save it for further posts as I watch more) I want to tell of the resonance I felt from the first episode. There is a scene where Lain is walking around picking up the sounds of transmissions in telephone wires in her head. This reminded me of my Mom who has symptoms of what can be called Schizophrenia (though it's not always good to use that word as it can carry stigma) and when I was young her symptoms were real intense. Nowadays while on medication the only thing that gets to her is messages on the line during a phone call, she calls it interference on the line. Usually spooky and threatening messages that try to make you feel bad. She told me they are not exactly auditory. So yea when I watched the show that scene hit me real well. I could feel the parallel.
On another scene in the first episode, a girl gets hit by a train. I know a girl who got hit by a train! She started acting strange at school, she was taking drugs like acid and who knows what else. Few years later she got hit by a train, so awful, I wanted to know what happened to her. 10 years later she showed up again, apparently lived just down the street. I could perhaps tell more of that story later. For now it is the immediate resonance of the image from Lain Serial Experiments and the parallels of recent events. Real trippy, it's good for me!!
A phase in the show is "everything is connected" which is really relevant today with the meltdown of the banks in the tech industry, artificial intelligence and real sick rich mavericks like Elon Musk who apparently do bizarre and cruel experiments on monkeys (can anyone fact check or verify this?) to develop tech for a computer/brain interface. Perhaps he took shows like this a little too far... and/or perhaps the show predicts some of these horrors. I think I may make a few more posts on this cartoon as I go through it again. This show was also a precursor to The Matrix! so no, it was not just Ghost In The Machine